Angels are watching over you [eye emoji]

I just saw a note on that post I did with the reindeer from 3x08 where I was laughing about Sam having a lil staring competition with it, and made a joke about it and got a random bit of hate out of the blue for my troubles… Suddenly remembered one of the only other times I’ve actually SEEN any of this mysterious fandom hate that I rarely actually encounter, was when I was commenting somewhere or other that Destiel starts in 1x12 (I mean I was being simplistic, *obviously* it has roots further back in 1x07 or 1x11 when we talk about narrative or symbolic character stuff)…

Anyway, concluding that apparently the most intolerable thing is getting your grubby little hands all over the early seasons by ever daring to even mention that in the future Dean is going to have one HECK of a thing for the angel, in the way that you can analyse any other part of the show for upcoming stuff such as knowing they’d been yearning to bring Mary back since at least like season 10 or something so all the little Mary-related things you find peppered through Carver era really are the build up to her return or whatever.

I’d like to just take a moment to bask in the fact that since 2x13 (also, you know… pre-Cas, in that holy untouched ground before Kripke decided to ruin the show by smearing angels all over it), Dean confirms that the last thing Mary ever said to him was “angels are watching over you”, and we see the Winchester family pre-goodnights in 1x01 in the very opening scene of the show, and so in the background of the very opening of the show, we have this important Destiel-related moment occurring; once retconned in in season 2, from then on that scene has the little gap where Mary says goodnight to Dean and makes the entire fucking show from the first 30 seconds about Destiel.

And of course Mary returning in season 12 immediately brings us to the subtext that this is a part of their lives. I remember a previous rewatch, before season 12, I was getting weepy about 2x20 and Dean using the “angels are watching over you” line as a way to prove to himself that the Mary of his dream was real. And wondering how when he got the real Mary back, he would use that to convince himself. Instead, he was the one who ended up convincing her, and then when we see it from her eyes, after telling her the barebones facts of her life as proof he knows her and a lot of her secrets like the deal in ways that she would never have told anyone so literally just, like, Azazel or Dean from 2016 could have told her this… :P

He takes her back to his secret Batcave and if we take her life continuously it’s been a couple of hours since she told this to her toddler Dean, but here is his actual angel who watches over him, rushing in for a hug… Again, just the way it looks to Mary… vindicating this thing she said, in an unexpected way, and despite how corrupted that line was in 5x13, turned into one of the few good and pure things to discover in the future. I even think that Cas was rushed back to the Bunker so quickly by the writing so that, because of the weight of 2x20 and answering it as fast as possible, using Cas to show Mary that she had been right about saying it…

And for season 12’s arc for Cas, that was actually a significant part of his own personal arc, feeling like the guardian angel. We talked after 12x01 about Mary casually using Cas as a tool with that “hurt him” comment because she had read how Dean surface level seemed to use Cas and misunderstood the dynamic (and again in 12x03, assuming he belonged and this was what he wanted/how he was happy living with them), because for her seeing him as a guardian angel was such a natural assumption given what she had said and how Cas of all things seems to be the most remarkable but also the easiest for her to absorb into her world view, because after all, she already believed it to an extent…

And by 12x19 Cas’s feeling about being a guardian angel is being laid right out in the open with it now being shown as a dangerous mindset in the same vein as the codependency - Cas’s attachment to protecting the Winchesters without involving them or consulting with them, drawing out the attitude behind season 6 (“I still considered myself the Winchesters’ guardian”) … and having just watched 11x17 which was a magnificent deconstruction of the issues behind the codependency, a template for what Berens and Dabb felt needed to be discussed about this all, in 12x19 Berens and Glynn deconstruct Cas for us and show us the underlying danger to himself of the patterns he’s fallen into (by, of course, making him fall into them and then fall prey to a cosmic force seeking a guardian angel of its own, and with a universe so full of dick angels, the one who has fallen closest to humanity and been twisted into something kind and loving and devoted to being a guardian like no others do… There is no replacement for Cas, the ultimate guardian angel. Like other seasons such as 5 which used Michael and Lucifer as the sibling parallel to Sam and Dean to show some of the issues in their lives, Jack exposes Cas’s core problem… that in the narrative, Mary once said, “angels are watching over you” and through enormous trials and with great irony, Cas has ended up being that angel and to her eyes, passing with flying colours in that job within hours of meeting him…

(And Mary is so important to the narrative and the way she unconsciously bent the entire Destiel narrative in this direction from the moment we found out what she said to Dean back in 2x13, Cas could not escape it… Fell into it in season 6 and Edund used this mindset maginficently to justify Cas’s actions…)

And… Anyway, when we analyse a show, all parts of it are on the table as puzzle pieces to move around as we see fit, and many pieces from past seasons fit with future seasons, and many episodes or characters fit easily to others, like one of those super simple kiddie puzzles where all the bits are the same basic shapes, and the artist has made a design that loops up almost any way you connect it to create a different, four dimensional picture that honestly is impossible to visualise and leaves me thinking of my attempts to meta as always being the person with the wall covered in bits of paper and photos with all the red string linking up… Anyway, for me, Destiel has all the red strings converge down in season 1 and 2, filling up the background of everything that’s going to happen with the pieces that are going to fit into the middle of so many character arcs and storylines in ways we never could have foretold but have now been built from the ground up from these ancient tropes and ideas on the show…

So yeah people who think of the first 3 seasons as some precious, untouched place Before Cas and Before Awful Destiel Shippers are actually Dead Wrong because as it has all unfolded, not just the shippers but the show itself has gone back time and time again and smeared its grubby, Cas-covered hands ALL over the show right back to the opening minute.

(The reindeer joke remains, however, a one-note blow air out of my nose moment and I am still baffled about why that of all things brought down brimstone and fury from someone with nothing better to do :P)

It’s been the practice of the last several decades– from modern criticism into the post-modern era– to understand a text as a cohesive whole even when a work was being written and published serially and important themes, symbols, characters, or plot arcs developed later or from a happy accident, as for instance Charles Dickens was wont to do. So yeah I think Dean was always set up for this big love story, but it turns out that Anna was a bust…